Abstract:
My goal is to understand the ecological significance of seed chemistry to
the seed and to its potential consumers and to identify some of the selection
pressures by seed predators that may lead to and maintain chemical traits of
seeds. This will be a blurred inquiry for two reasons. First, our knowledge of
seed chemistry is unusually incomplete; seeds generally have not been studied
as organisms but as sources of drugs, chemotaxonomic traits, or food for
man and domestic animals. It is the nature of such inquiries to study one
aspect of many species of seeds, rather than study many aspects of one species
of seed. Second, those who have studied seeds as organisms have treated them
largely as inert pills to be dispersed or as black boxes which generate seedlings.
